A site where a man with far too much interest in beer gets to write about it.

Monday, 18 July 2016

Finally in Forchheim

My Summer holiday this year was in the Dolomites in Italy. The area used to be part of Austria so the beer is generally Germanic, being pleasant enough but nothing to write home about.

One of the lumps of rock I climbed

Whilst driving home through Bavaria it occurred to me that I might do rather better here. I remembered that I had Trips! (South) on my kindle so after a quick look the route was changed to go via Forchheim. According to the guide this town has three brewery taps in one street so it seemed an ideal place to visit.

A friendly local and a handy map in the guide soon had us where we wanted and I was supping a beer from an earthenware mug I'm sure Orwell would have approved of.

We sat outside Brauerei Hebendanz as it was dead inside. The beer was very good, and had the sort of drinkablility that's problematic when you still have important things to do, like find a campsite and put a tent up. The beer mat seemed to be extolling the virtues of the Beer Purity Law so I decided not to tell them how much they could improve their beer by adding cacao nibs. I'm sure some of my fellow beer geeks will soon do this vital task for me though.

We wandered on a few doors to get to the next brewery tap but sadly soon realised it had closed. This meant we had to walk several doors back to get to Brauerei Neder. Unlike our last stop this place was packed, and had a very pub like feel.

The one draught beer was served straight from the barrel, and when you wanted another you could simply lie your mug flat and another beer would be brought.

a tilted mug awaiting replacement

We loved it in here, and I was delighted to have finally found German lager that I liked. Unfiltered, unpasteurised and served without extraneous CO2 it got me wondering if the one true living beer breathes with two lungs. After all our mother church already, quite rightly, accepts that they have different brewing traditions over on the continent. I guess with lager the lower temperature of conditioning means there's enough CO2 that it doesn't need to secondary fermentation in the container from which it's served. I think the CAMRA technical committee needs to look into this and tell me if I was drinking real lager.

We really had to move on after this, and ended up camping in Bug near Bamburg*. We really were in decent beer land as the campsite bar had an unfiltered (indeed ungespundetes) beer, as well as pils, hefeweizen and rauchbier. I had to have the ungespundetes:

And the rauchbier:

Come on, I was in Bamburg, how could I not?

*I was delighted to see when the left that the village had a hotel called Buger Hof.